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Tiny Furniture (USA, 2010)

Directed by: LenaDunham. Friends of mine were gushing about Girls, and my TV aversion was strong, so instead of that, I checked out this, Lena Dunham’s first feature. It was on a Criterion set along with some interviews and her first “student-looking” short film. I have to say, I really enjoyed this movie. There’s a lot to be said about this kind of vaguely whiny, mopey, 20-something, quarter-life crisis, numbed-by-the-existential-crises-of-modernity/postmodernity-first-world-problems blah blah blah whatever subgenre typified by movies as widely adored as they are reviled—Lost in Translation, Garden State, everything by Wes Anderson, and this burgeoning mumblecore movement (the only example of which I’ve seen I hated). I’m obviously not a big authority on this whole thing, but if, for the sake of this review, we’re grouping all of those films together with this one in some kind of edifice, then I definitely consider this to be among the good examples of this kind of thing. There’s definitely a fine line here: to some extent, it’s automatically annoying to see this kind of twentysomething, postgrad, self-obsessed hipster wankoff genre, no matter what they try to do with it. In this case, what Lena Dunham’s trying to do with it is something pretty self-reflexive, sometimes very harshly critical of her generation and her home culture (generally speaking: this whole University grad hipster thing), but also treating it with enough TLC to prevent it from being dismissive. This movie takes a sincere, caring, but uncompromisingly severe look at some of these aspects of youth culture that have been on my mind lately. There has been and will be a lot of articles posted and opinions declared about this postmodern conundrum called the hipster, but all of them should stop and watch this movie first. I’m not saying this movie will answer all of their questions, but it’s probably a way more insightful a look at the topic than anything they’re likely to write.